Assistant Professor Chitraleka Basu won the James B. Christoph Award for the best conference paper presented by a junior faculty member at APSA in Washington, DC. Her paper "Democratizing from Within: British Elites and the Expansion of the Franchise" was presented in the British Politics Group.

The committee commented its decision as followed: "The paper by Basu et al is a study of why parliamentary elites, in the then two great parties of state, ceded power to the masses. It is ambitious and contributes to a gap in the literature. The method of this paper is to count and study roll call votes in the Commons on franchise reform from 1826-1918. The authors seek to measure the nature of elite preferences towards democracy and how it interacts with economic and social modernisation at the time. The scholarship is analytical, demonstrates rigour and is worthy of the Christoph Prize."